Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert. Unpaid compliance simp.
This whole article/blog post reads as “How dare this person follow the law. ;(”
I really don’t understand the pushback on this one person for submitting the change request. When it is the lawmaker that put this law into place that we should be criticizing. The post repeatedly uses how the contributer said that the change was “hilariously pointless and ineffective.” As some sort of gotcha as to why the merge should not have been accepted but does not explain why the maintainers should not follow the law other than “law bad”.
It also consistently calls out the various peoples’ places of work and experience as some sort of boogeyman for why they should not be allowed to contribute to open source. If these people were universally accepted to be bad actors in the community then they would not be accepted as reviewers for these projects. This just attacks their character to try to prove a point.
Let’s just ignore whether there’s any moral or ethical arguments about legal compliance: What law is this man complying with? This is not a law that governs him. He is volunteering, and not compelled. There is no sanctity of law at play here.
Are you implying that only people who are affected by something are allowed to contribute to open source projects? If this were some nobody developer in California would that really make you any more likely to accept that this merge request is okay?
There’s no subtext. This man has no obligation to this law, so “How dare this person follow the law. ;(” isn’t relevant. This man is not following a law, he is simply going about his day. He is volunteering, and not compelled. There is no sanctity of law at play here.
But, to play ball, yes. If a person who would otherwise receive punishment were to do this, I would take that into account. That is not the case here.